Reason Studios

Reason Studios is the Swedish music-software company behind Reason, the DAW built around a virtual, patchable device rack. Founded as Propellerhead Software in 1994 (Stockholm) and renamed Reason Studios in 2019, it shipped the first Reason in 2000 and is now, per the MusicTech review, marking 25 years of the product with version 14 (2026).

Beyond Reason, Propellerhead/Reason Studios is known for ReBirth (a TB-303/TR-808 emulation), the ReWire inter-application audio protocol, and the Rack Extension format for third-party devices inside Reason’s rack. The company’s through-line is the rack-and-cable metaphor — modelling studio hardware in software and letting users patch it — which is exactly the design idea this spoke keeps returning to.

In this wiki

• reason — the DAW / Reason Rack plugin, version 14 (2026).

Reason Studios is the spoke’s first DAW maker, distinct from its boutique-synth makers (analogue-solutions, cyma-forma), free-plugin developers (audio-damage, tilr), and the groovebox vendor akai.